0.18 Public Release - Animated artworks, remastered scene, story continuation and more!

Hey all,

Finally, I have something ready to be shipped for the public 0.18 update. As I have been keeping you guys posted these last weeks, the scope is mostly some new animated artwork, a big remaster for the last stream scenes with color and background, more gameplay mechanics around the stream & moderation and continuation/teasers for the story.

I will provide unlocked savefiles starting right before the beginning of the ManyFans stream scene (starting with the peeping scene on Clem) so you guys can enjoy the new artwork and content. As usual, old savefiles can cause compatibility issues so better start fresh.

Status update

Once again, this is not the retrospective so expect another post this week to go in further details about all of this. As expected though, some significant schedule issues with a bunch of different reasons. I'm still glad I took the time to learn animation and practice coloring, as I feel like this is the quality standard I want to set going forwards (which also means remastering all of the existing black and white artworks, and more animated scenes in the future). I overall like the new artwork but everything needs to be reworked to match up this style and quality.

I tried implementing more interactivity to the whole ManyFans gameplay, which I feel can integrate pretty well with the "moderator" trope. I experimented with a couple of mechanics which for now have limited impact to the content but is still there as a small, non-grindy minigame which I like to diversify the gameplay.

Obviously, I have a lot to improve regarding my processes and project management as a whole, but these last few months have also been pretty rough on me on the personal aspect and I really have to take care of my physical & mental health if I want to improve the way I manage this project.

What's new

A bunch of stuff, new & remastered artwork, dialogue & story, and some gameplay mechanics:

• Entirely remastered and colored scene with Clem

• Backgrounds for these last two scenes

• Animated scene with Jade

• New dialogue

• Continuation of the story teasing some upcoming arcs as we're nearing the end of the party

• Improvements in the ManyFans streams: chat should feel more organic, less repetitive

• ManyFans moderation minigames

• Possibility to save animated artworks to the gallery

• A bunch of bugfixes and some performance improvements

What's next

New content is the main focus, as I want to bring this story arc (and then this day) to a conclusion so it does not drag too much. Old artworks reworks & coloring are still on the backlog, with the black & whites ones in priority (I want everything colored then I will probably do another pass on the colored artwork from day 1 which are not up to par with the recent artworks).

Basically, the story will continue. Still not entirely sure about the evolution of the pace of the narration, but I do think I want more (explicit) content in the next updates, as it's a lot of teasing and peeping for now! I will probably do content polls to gauge what you guys think and want.

Sound will also be the focus of future updates; as I already talked about, I want to implement a music app but also rework the overall sound design which is for now basically nonexistent.

On the technical side

As mentioned earlier, a lot of work to accomodate the animated artworks with the engine I work with. I'm still not satisfied with the technical solutions I came up with, as compression and the formats I ended up using result in losses of quality, visual artifacts and subpar performance. I'm still investigation to improve on all of these aspects. This homemade UI engine was pretty much just a text chat app at the very beginning of the project, so all the features and apps I added along the way need a lot of codebase maintenance and refactoring.

Animated artworks can now be saved to the gallery, so feel free to screenshot the streams and take the time to enjoy the animation in your personal app.

Feedback is always very much appreciated. I really hope you guys will enjoy the new content even though I guess we always want more.

I can thank you guys enough for the support, and I hope you'll bear with me as I try to improve my processes and streamline the development of this project which is still something I'm very passionate about. I'm going through a lot of stuff but I'm slowly figuring everything out and my motivation to keep the project alive has not faltered.

Stay tuned for the upcoming retrospective and other blogspots!